Expertise

I am interested in intonation, sociolinguistics, and languages in contact. In my research, I have studied Spanish intonation in Peru and Ecuador, and intonation of Cuzco Quechua (Peru) and Tena Quichua (Ecuador).  I have also examined Quechua and Aymara relative clauses, vowels in Aymara, and Spanish-English code-switching. I am also interested in investigating Spanish in the United States in contact with both English and other varieties of Spanish.

Dr. O’Rourke’s research interests include Intonation and prosodic variation; Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics; Language contact;  Acoustic and articulatory phonetics; Sociophonetics; Quechua dialectology, and Andean and Amazonian linguistics; Indigenous languages of Latin America. Additional interests include code-switching, Spanish in the US, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and statistical methods in linguistic research.


Subject Area

  • Spanish
Past Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Spanish Program, Department of Modern Languages and Classics, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Alabama

Assistant Professor, Linguistics, Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh (past)

Communities
Spanish
Degrees
PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spanish Linguistics, 2005
MA, Pennsylvania State University, Spanish Linguistics, 1998
AB, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spanish, 1994
BS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chemistry, 1994